"From Kuroth’s Quill" is grodog's regular design column covering the elements of adventure design (and more-specifically dungeon design, given my interest in that topic). I will also wander through the design of spells and magic items; monsters, traps, tricks, and treasures; PC and NPC classes; planes and pantheons; and likely other topics as well. In the blog, I hope to provide practical examples that will be useful in campaign play, to show theory in action.

12 January 2018

I have played D&D now for more than 41 years (since I was seven years old), and during those decades I've created many maps, with several periods of higher production back-in-the-day and more-recently since the (re-)advent of the mega-dungeon over the past 15 years or so. I've shared my maps at several old-school forums, including (among those still alive and kicking), the Knights & Knaves Alehouse, Dragonsfoot, ODD74, and various Greyhawk-specific forums like Canonfire!, as well as my grodog's Greyhawk website, and a few here-and-there have found their way to Facebook. The maps all vary in age, size, spi (squares per inch), media (pencil, colored pencil, colored ink pen, colored marker), intricacy, and level of completion. I'd begun to re-inventory them over the past year or so, both to update my grodog's Castle Greyhawk archive, and to insure that I don't lose track of some of them. This series is an effort to help me keep on-track with that inventory work, as well as an opportunity to revisit some maps I've not looked at in a long time, as well as, perhaps, to complete some that have lain fallow. I'm
(mostly) thankful that I haven't lost too many of my old creations,
since I've heard several stories from Rob Kuntz lamenting lost maps and
keys, manuscripts, entire
sourcebooks, and such over the years. Of course, such juvenilia's
survival into the present is a double-edged sword: some are definitely lame. But
even lame maps may often offer us opportunities to learn, and hopefully
some nuggets to salvage and to bring forward into newer designs. At minimum, they should demonstrate the progress I've made as a
designer (in my eyes, at least ;) ), keep this whole blogging thing from going to my head, and hopefully some elements from
the worst of them can still be repurposed:

We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better, stronger, faster.

--- The Six Million Dollar Man (1974)

So, I'll start this series about my maps---and perhaps their keys (we'll see; many of the levels remain unkeyed)---by beginning with one of my earliest surviving examples. Here are the c. 1982-1984 maps from V1 Vanquish the Evil, drawn completely in green marker ink (I have no idea why!):

V1 Vanquish the Evil - Level 01 Map

V1 Vanquish the Evil - Level 02 Map

My next post will discuss the maps, and perhaps some of the history of V1 Vanquish the Evil, or I may just move on to greener pastures. We'll see! :D

07 January 2018

The Hyqueous Vaults was published over the holidays. It is a free adventure written by members of the Knights & Knaves Alehouse forums to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the publication of OSRIC (the Old School Reference & Index Compilation, the first published retro-clone and the one focused on 1e Advanced Dungeons & Dragons):

Its authors were

Rebecca Dettmann - contributed the original map design, further modified and rendered by Guy as we developed the scenario

Guy Fullerton - managed all of the project coordination and most of the editing, created more than half of the adventure, and wrote or converted seven new monsters and magic items

Allan T. Grohe Jr. (me!) - I wrote three encounter clusters, and one of the magic items, and did some editing

Jimm Johnson - wrote two of the encounter clusters and a magic item

Matthew Riedel - wrote two of the encounter clusters and a new monster

Alex Zisch - provided the back cover illustration and all of the interior artwork, and wrote two of the new magic items

The Hyqueous Vaults has been reviewed twice soon after its release, and has been well-received to date:

If you're interested in the development of the project, you can read its history on K&K at http://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=13846.
We all riffed off of each other's ideas, modified the map, and plugged
away at designing the encounters. That discussion also includes some
extensive discussion from the playtesting sessions, too.

Followers

About grodog

Allan T. Grohe Jr. has been playing D&D and other rpgs since 1977. Allan’s first professional gaming publication (“More for the Shadow Master”) appeared in White Wolf Magazine #11 in 1987; he has also contributed to The Unspeakable Oath, Pyramid, Polyhedron, and Dragon Magazine, among others. Allan co-founded Event Horizon Productions, and has worked extensively with Biohazard Games (Blue Planet, Upwind), Pagan Publishing (Call of Cthulhu publisher of Delta Green), Different Worlds Publications (Tadashi Ehara), and Pied Piper Publishing (Robert J. Kuntz). Allan co-founded Black Blade Publishing with Jon Hershberger in 2009.
Allan’s editorial, design, and development work has contributed to winning one Origins Award and securing four Origins Award nominations, winning one ENnie Award and two ENnie Award nominations.
Allan is known online as grodog, where he publishes a website featuring Greyhawk D&D content, as well as his non-gaming writing (poetry, personal essays, and literary scholarship), and the usual fan ephemera. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, with his lovely wife Heather, their two boys Ethan and Henry, and their two pugs Tara and Gypsy.